At some point anybody that has been anywhere near the application development process has sat through a "blamestorming" session where developers and network administrators point fingers back and forth.

The problem with most of these sessions is that rarely does anybody have any data at hand to back up their position. With that issue in mind, in advance of the holidays maybe the time has come to give developers their own network analyzers.

Historically, network analyzers have been arcane tools for tracking issues related to specific protocols. But with the advent of new analyzers from companies such as Wild Packets, IT people can track things at the packet level now. Furthermore, companies such as Wild Packet have been doing a better job at creating user interfaces that even more mortals can understand.

Of course, we all know that developers are some of the smartest people on the planet. Ask any one of them and they will tell you. What they can understand is why people don't behave as logically as they have set up their applications.

But as smart as they are they are frequently in denial when it comes to anything that somebody who manages IT infrastructure has to say. So perhaps the time has come to give every developer their very own network analyzer so they can see for themselves what the real problem is with their application. No doubt there will also be issues with the underlying infrastructure. But at least now developers would not be able to say they were not aware of them.

And even if that doesn't put an end to all the "blamestorming" sessions, it should at least help make them mercifully shorter.